Tag Archives: documentary

RIP Marcel Ophuls (1927 – 2025)

Alweer een dode, een van de 120 per jaar of zo, het getal blijft door de jaren heen relatief constant, een om de drie dagen.

‘Zie je in welke staat je dochter is? Dat is jouw verantwoordelijkheid. Zeg mij waar je andere twee kinderen zijn en ik [spaar ze] alle drie.’–Klaus Barbie

Marcel Ophuls was een documentairemaker die vooral herinnerd zal worden voor twee films: The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) en Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988).

Ik wil het hebben over die tweede docu, die het verhaal vertelt van de nazi Klaus Barbie die tijdens de bezetting van Frankrijk bekendstond als de beenhouwer van Lyon.

Ophuls focust in die documentaire vooral op tegenstrijdige getuigenissen. De slachtoffers vertellen hoe Barbie hen martelde; maar volgens de Amerikaanse inlichtingsdiensten, die Barbie na de Tweede Wereldoorlog schaamteloos in Bolivia inzetten om de militaire dictatuur via een schrikbewind van terreur in het zadel te houden, kan het haast amper dat Barbie martelde, ‘hij had dat niet nodig zeggen ze, zo goed was hij.’

Rond een uur en vier minuten zit een getuigenis die mij bijzonder aangreep. Een vrouw wordt als kind opgepakt, Barbie martelt haar en laat de deur van de martelkamer openstaan zodat haar moeder het kan zien en horen. Hij spreekt tot de moeder en zegt: ‘Zie je in welke staat je dochter is? Dat is jouw verantwoordelijkheid. Zeg mij waar je andere twee kinderen zijn en ik [spaar ze] alle drie.’

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RIP Agnès Varda (1928 – 2019)

Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French film director.

Her films were popular among critics and directors, giving her the status of a cult director.

This is perhaps not the best of times to rid the world of a minor misconception regarding the work of Varda, but it is what I must do after researching her oeuvre following her death.

Agnès Varda made one film about the Black Panther Party, just one. That film was Black Panthers (1968), a color film which can be viewed in its entirety at Archive.org[1].

Another film from that same year is called Huey! and is directed by a certain Sally Pugh. It can be seen in full on YouTube [below] and has nothing to do with Varda, although the general subject matter as well as some scenes overlap.

On the ‘making of’ of a surrealist ‘cult of ugliness’ documentary

Yesterday 14/3/19 I watched Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (2018) at CinemaZuid.

The film is interesting for its details on the ‘making-of’ of Land Without Bread (1933).

It reveals how Buñuel staged several scenes of his documentary: killing a donkey to be ‘eaten’ alive by bees and killing a goat to be eaten by the locals who would otherwise never eat meat.

While showing a dwarf in the style (or maybe it is that same dwarf) as depicted in fig. 44 of Las Jurdes : Étude de géographie humaine (1927), the book that was the inspiration for the film, the narrator says:

“Dwarfs and morons are very common in the upper Hurdanos mountains. Their families employ them as goat herders if they’re not too dangerous. The terrible impoverishment of this race is due to the lack of hygiene, undernourishment and constant intermarriage. The smallest one of these creatures is 28 years old. Words cannot express the horror of their mirthless grins as they play a sort of hide and go seek.”

‘Dwarf’ from ‘Land Without Bread’

Another scene shows a sickly and very thin girl lying in the street:

“In a deserted street, we come across this child. Our guide tells us that she has been lying there for the last three days … but no one seems to know what her ailment is. One of our companions examines her. The child’s throat and tonsils are terribly inflamed. But unfortunately, we could do nothing about it. Malady and infestation is their lot. Two days later, they told us that the child had died.”

After watching the whole Land Without Bread film, I got the impression that Buñuel wanted to go for a lost tribe effect, since the opening title card reads:

The Hurdanos were unknown, even in Spain, until a road was built for the first time in 1922. Nowhere does man need to wage a more desperate fight against the hostile forces of nature.”

And a little bit further, when showing a baby covered in trinkets:

“Though actually Christian, these trinkets are amazingly like the charms of African natives.”

On the Hurdanos walking barefoot:

“Shoes are a rare luxury and the roads are cruel to naked feet.”

Graham Greene, in a review of the movie for Night and Day magazine, called it “an honest and hideous picture.”

And ugly it is.

Land Without Bread is reminiscent of Misère au Borinage (1934), both are political films in the tradition of the cult of ugliness which can be traced to The Potato Eaters(1885).

Coke? The perfect commodity.

http://vimeo.com/105411099

Coke? The perfect commodity. Why?

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology documentary Slavoj Žižek explains.

The documentary is now online in full. (update: the documentary was taken offline a few days after I had posted it.)

Slavoj Žižek is unique in using films to prove philosophical points, see film and philosophy.

The full text of the The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is here[1].

 

Sex: The Revolution (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_43UG3y8uh4

Sex: The Revolution (2008) was a four-part documentary miniseries that chronicled the history of sexual culture in America from the 1950s through the turn of the millenium. Ironically, the version shown on VH1 was pixelated to censor nudity including in discussions of censorship of nudity.

I’m afraid this is that pixelated version.

Nevertheless, they are all here. Follow the links[1][2][3][4].

Previously on this blog: Do Communists Have Better Sex?[5], 2006, a documentary by André Meier